Feature creep: the latest horror in a hi-tech world

The new digital camera was so tiny it fitted into our shirt
pocket but the user's manual that came with it was bigger than
Anna Karenina. I knew it would be like that. You cannot make
the transition to high-tech equipment without pain, boredom, an
instructional DVD and a tutorial or two.

The old camera had served us well over decades: point and press,
and the chemist shop did the rest. But lest we appeared to be
Neanderthals on a holiday to India, with its half-billion IT gurus,
it was time to take the plunge. Into the hand luggage went the
instruction manual, along with Anna Karenina - it was past
time for reading Tolstoy, too.

You needed a flight to New Delhi to read the manual, and while I
dipped into the novel, he who was once an electrical engineer, with
gritted teeth and admirable diligence, applied himself to the other
tome. There were, he told me as we landed, different settings for
"night party", "night landscape", "dusk/dawn", "beach/snow",
"portrait", and so on. Oh, and there was a setting called
"automatic".

How did it happen that the simplest piece of equipment became
dauntingly high-tech, that every advance in technology brings with
it complexity, frustration and a dreary pile of homework?

Even the humble toothbrush in its high-tech manifestation has
transformed itself into a "liquid toothpaste dispensing system"
equipped with packets of paste that are downloaded into a hard
drive, and a DVD to tell you how to use it.

Coffee-makers once made coffee. Now they can be programmed the
night before to wake you up, sing a cheery tune and, if you've got
the sequence right, serve you an espresso or a cappuccino or a
latte. The car dashboard resembles the cockpit of a fighter plane
with its array of throbbing lights that manage to obscure the
location of the car radio. You can even dispense with the humble
door key if you trust your computerised home security system to
unlock the door on command.

Don't get me started on mobile phones. One mobile we had took
pictures, downloaded emails, woke us up and beat us at chess. The
only thing it turned out not to do reliably was receive phone
calls.

I know a man who has one remote control for his air-conditioner,
television, digital set-top box, DVD and CD player. He's a computer
whiz but even he occasionally raises the room temperature when he
tries to turn up the volume on the TV. I tell my disbelieving
children television sets once came with an on/off button and a dial
for changing the channel, and that when I was a teenage babysitter
I could go into anyone's house and watch a program without having
to get detailed instructions first.

Lest you think me a Luddite, I'm all for certain advances -
voicemail, for example, has been a boon. But look what they've done
to voicemail. At my office they've installed a new version that
requires you to press 10 digits in a particular sequence to
retrieve a single message. And before you can hear from the caller,
a disembodied voice drones on about options you never use, and
information you don't need. The upcoming message is "13 seconds",
it confides.

Computers - well, we couldn't live without them, could we? But
love-hate best describes how many of us feel about the tempestuous
creatures, given their propensity to implode or freeze for no good
reason, and to catch more viruses than a toddler at child care.
Every software update brings new problems, along with superfluous
functions. The imperative from "security" to regularly change your
password means many people get so befuddled they commit their
latest code to yellow stickers - rather defeating the purpose of
"security". No, we couldn't live without them but when my
79-year-old widowed mother recently decided to get a computer, I
begged her (unsuccessfully) to desist, rightly predicting the angst
its tantrums would cause.

The culprit, though, is not high technology, so much of which is
life-enhancing. Rather, it is feature creep - cameras with too many
options, mobile phones with excess functions. It was when Roland
Rust, a marketing professor at the University of Maryland, was
given a mousepad with a calculator, radio and alarm clock embedded
(and a user's manual) that he coined the term "feature fatigue". He
threw the mousepad in the bin and embarked on a research project
that found consumers were attracted to products with multiple
features. BMW was giving customers what they thought they wanted
when it put 700 features on the computer console of one of its
luxury models. But when customers took these products home from the
shop, Rust found, they were overwhelmed. The products were simply
too hard to use.

Much of the time we blame ourselves for being useless rather
than blaming the products for being user-unfriendly. The computer
inside a product should make it easier to use, not harder. It
should not be necessary for us to take up the offer that came with
the digital camera: two free tutorials. But we will. We're still
unsure of when it's OK to use "automatic".